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[–] 52 points 1 year ago (6 children)

Wouldn't it evaporate in like 5 seconds, then? Also, drainage would be the easiest thing ever. Don't even need a slanted floor.

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  • [–] 17 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    That'd be awful. You want the stuff in water out of your house, not precipitated all over the floor.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (4 children)

    What stuff in water? Are you referring to drainage?

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

    Minerals, dirt, pathogens, etc.

    If you wash your ear raw chicken (you shouldn't), that splatter would be much more evenly spread over every surface it lands on.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

    Well yeah, I'm not advocating we convert to surface-tensionless water, here. I'm just pointing out the flaw in this meme's logic.

    Now on to serious questions, wtf is an ear chicken?

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  • [–] 23 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Sounds like a lot less cleaning in the house as it would just evaporate in less than a minute?

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    High humidity tends to ruin a lot of houses/construction materials over time, but you'll likely first notice random spores

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  • [–] 22 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    Your floor would have to be supernaturally flat and level for that to happen.

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  • [–] 18 points 1 year ago (5 children)
  • [+] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)
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  • [+] 14 points 1 year ago (8 children)
  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (7 children)

    i think without surface tension it would also just fall out of the cloth as soon as you lift it, because nothing would wick against gravity. in fact of your floor is pourous at all, i reckon the water would just immediately all flow further down and you’d be left with a dry floor.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Oil doesn’t have surface tension and it stays in the cloth. At a certain point it’s not surface tension that keeps liquids together but friction.

    Says my uneducated ass.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    oils have low surface tension, i believe a true no-surface tension liquid is as impossible as a true frictionless surface.

    i didn’t consider friction though! i think the rag would still dry out completely pretty quick, but you might have a few seconds while the water falls out depending on how tight the mesh is?

    i dunno, this is a real whacky thing to think about!

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    Without surface tension it would stick to whatever thing attracts it more. And a normal piece of cloth attracts water way more than a normal non-carpet floor.

    But it also wouldn't flow freely as the GP expects either. Some oils have almost no surface tension, and they are famously a nightmare to clean up.

    As a positive, the water would evaporate faster.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    the cloth attracts it because of the capillary action pulling water into the gaps therein, and capillary action relies on surface tension! i think without outside forces like suction, the liquid in this scenario would never flow against gravity.

    i think hahah

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Surface tension doesn't tell you anything about the cloth-water interface.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    late reply but i ONLY JUST CONSIDERED, the cloth would most likely have some static charge which WOULD result in a literal “attraction force” towards the water!

    physics is so stupid, i love it so much

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  • [–] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

    Wouldn’t it just be a superfluid at that point? Those things are ungovernable. We’d have way more problems that just spilled puddles. They crawl out of the beakers on their own. It’d be an absolute nightmare.

    My bad superfluids are 0 viscosity not surface tension carry on we’re safe.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    I heard about superfluid crawling out of a container. But I wonder in this case, what works the fluid against the gravity upward the wall of the container?

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    Capillary action; which is a combination of adhesion, cohesion, and surface tension and for superfluids the additional ack of friction.

    Unfortunately, if cohesion is removed from water, this might drastically change if the water can crawl up the container (the details would be based on the specific physics of this imaginary universe).

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    That's how water works in videogames

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    [–] 7 points 1 year ago

    good news: it wouldn't be

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Assuming my home is perfectly level, which it is not

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    [–] 5 points 1 year ago

    Would capillary action still work, or does it depend on surface tension? I'm thinking about superfluids. Would the water stop at covering the floor?

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago

    Probably our bodies would instantly collapse into ooze like that guy in the first X-Men.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago
    [–] 3 points 1 year ago

    What if each H2O molecule was coated in a hydrophobic substance?

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